


on running

by maelidify



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: 3x12 - Freeform, Canon Divergence, Demons, Drabble, F/M, Grief/Mourning, I used the non-con warning just in case but really it's just a brief ontari mention, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-16 04:39:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14804531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maelidify/pseuds/maelidify
Summary: Wherein Emori doesn't take the chip.





	on running

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for (the second) memori appreciation week's day one prompt: canon-divergence...

Otan cannot be gone.

“Your brother is waiting for you,” the man says. Emori looks him straight in the eyes, ignoring the impossibility of what he is telling her, ignoring the potential for grief, for destructive despair. Otan cannot be gone. It is firmly impossible. It cannot be true and she knows it’s true nonetheless but she won’t let the truth of it fill her eyes and spill over so this man can see. John never trusted this man, his former leader, so why should she trust him now?

“So is John,” he says and these are the words that instinctively guide her hand to his, guide her fingers to grasp the small metal chip he is offering. It looks innocuous. She knows it can’t be.

The chip is cool in Emori’s hand, and she can almost feel it humming against her skin. She could take it, let it dissolve in her mouth and change her on the inside the way this man has been changed, the way Otan was changed just a few days ago when she last saw him. This man is offering her a way to John if only she–

She closes her fist around the chip. “Thanks,” she says calmly and looks at this man, who she remembers from the desert and again from the shore, “but no.”

And then she is running.  


* * *

  
She runs faster than her own grief. It can’t catch up to her when she does this. It is impossible.    


* * *

   
When she stops moving to eat, to drink water, to grasp at her arms and not think about Otan’s death and John’s capture, the next step is obvious. John had to have been taken to Polis. He has to be alive still. She still feels his shadows on her skin from their time together, and she remembers the way he was wrenched from her mid-con, the quick intelligence of his speech when he talked his way out of a quick execution. He halted his own death by showing his captors the chip in his hand; perhaps, if she is intercepted, she can use the same trick.

But they would have to catch her first.  


* * *

   
Emori has known many frikdreina in her life, and she’s always considered one of the lucky ones. Not lucky enough, of course. None of them are. But her mutation isn’t on her face. It doesn’t halt her movement. It doesn’t slow her speech or diminish her eyesight.

In the circles with whom she has traveled, the standard of measuring luck is based on how easily you can slip into a clan and facilitate a con. Emori, in that sense, is very lucky.

She doesn’t feel very lucky once she slows down and sneaks into Polis, passing as a food vendor. Her hands shake as she turns rat after rat over the fire and she keeps her wrapped left hand to the shadows, wishing she could diminish its size through sheer willpower. She knows how to make herself sound small, unworthy of attention. She knows how to be a shadow, but the grief is threatening to catch up with her and she cannot focus properly on the stillness, on the quality of deception. The grief is swift, the grief and its flashes of quick pain, of memory, of things that cannot be pushed aside.

(Otan, when they were children, adopting one another in the desert and stealing water jugs from sleeping travelers.

Otan, when they finally escaped Baylis, and his sobs wouldn’t stop, and she kept her hand wrapped tightly around his, as though the pressure of their closeness could erase the pain and the bitterness and the abuse.

Otan, meeting up with her in the desert through con after con, until she conned a group of travelers from the sky, until she met–)

“John,” she says softly, seeing him in the distance, following after the new commander. Grim, bitter, dressed in a flamekeeper’s ragged coat. Alive.

 

* * *

  
The procession is on the other side of the square and she cannot make it over to him before he disappears, but for the rest of the day, she listens for rumors about the new commander’s flamekeeper. When she hears speculation that they are lovers, she feels a strange mingling of jealousy and pride. He must be manipulating her for the sake of some con, and he is evidently doing it well. She thinks of her time with John in the woods, their moments in the cave, his warm, soft, scarred skin, and tries not to feel the pressure around her heart, so tight it feels like it could compress it to nothing.  


* * *

  
The next day, the commander walks through her area of the market and there he is. So close she could run up to him, snake her around around his middle, grin against his back. She doesn’t, but she hisses, “Hey, stranger,” as he passes by.

His face when it breaks into a smile is so destructively beautiful that she could cry. But she doesn’t.

“Care for a bite?” she says instead.

“Emori,” he says, stepping closer, “what the hell are you doing here?”

She could be subtle. She could control her body language so that it doesn’t angle toward him like their bodies belong close together, closer than anything, but she doesn’t. She leans in towards him. “Looking for you,” she whispers and their eyes meet, and she sees the joy and the pain and everything else, all written there in his eyes. He has been hurt. He is hurting.  


* * *

  
When she approaches the meeting place, she can tell he’s tense. He’s afraid of who might be watching, who might be noticing he’s gone.

She has felt him gone every day since he was taken. Now, his presence is a complicated gift. But she still sneaks up on him and relishes the way he grins when he sees it’s her, the way he tugs her into the small torch-lit room, the soft persistence of his mouth on hers.

“Quick,” she says into his mouth and she doesn’t know why she says it except that she does know. She wants him, she wants him before this is all over, before he gets taken from her again. She wants to run with him while she can, before she’s running alone again, and with nothing to run towards.

He sees something in her eyes and pulls back. “Emori? What’s wrong?”

And she could ask him the same question and she tries to bite back the cry in her throat but it comes out anyway. “It’s Otan,” she manages, and then she’s in his arms and he’s holding her like she’s going to slip away if he lets up for one moment.  


* * *

  
She doesn’t know why, but she tells him about a day in her childhood when she and Otan decided to hide from one another in the woods. It was a stupid child’s game, and very dangerous for children like them, and she wound up so lost that she didn’t see her brother for an entire day. When she did find him, he was shivering and sad and lost and she told him that from then on, they would always be together and she would always make sure he was warm.  


* * *

  
Before John leaves to go back to the commander, he tells her.

“She’s taken a liking to me,” he says. They’re sitting side-by-side on the floor; the torrent of her grief is behind them, and when she looks at him, she can tell this is where is pain resides.

“Taken a liking?” she says, but she knows what it means. He draws his hand away from hers guiltily; she grasps it back, even as her heart tightens again.

“I don’t have a choice,” he says, and she realizes the rumors were wrong. He isn’t the new Heda’s lover; he’s something worse entirely.           

Her flood of emotions is indecipherable. There must be a way, she thinks, to kill this woman and flee Polis with John, to find their cave again, and their furs, and the brief life they’d built together. That impossible warmth they’d found, something like the feeling of their hands clasped while running.

But first. He had just listened to the torrent of her grief. She faces him, moves a strand of hair out of his eyes.

“Tell me, John,” she says, meaning the pain and the hurt and the torment and the hope. _Please_ , she thinks,  _tell me about all of it_.

And he does.


End file.
